Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker?

Does being a philosopher mean that you are a better thinker? Does being an architect mean that you are a better designer of buildings? 

The position of authority many assume derives primarily from their educational and professional background: in matters historical we listen to historians, in matters of health to medical professionals. This seems only logical but the situation becomes more complicated when the subject under consideration involves a capacity we all should posses, such as reasoning. Does a philosopher perform better in reasoning than others? We should certainly expect that: a philosopher has learned what reasoning entails more explicitly and in more detail than others. A philosopher has studied the corpus of philosophical works, so has access to hundreds of relevant views and approaches that inform and structure their own reasoning. So far so good; we can learn a lot from a philosopher. 

The problems start when philosophy becomes self-referential: when it addresses issues and debates within that corpus, with little regard for what a wider audience might understand. It's one thing to explain that what one is saying draws from other sources for reasons of credit, justification, transparency etc., another to try to impress by endless name-dropping that can feel mind-numbing for an audience and yet another to withdraw to the fundamental issues or technicalities of one's own discipline with little regard for what takes place outside of it. Philosophical debates are fine in philosophical circles but out of place in analyses of non-philosophical subjects that could profit from the rigour of philosophical reasoning. 

Similarly, architects have been trained in how to design buildings and have studied what other architects have done in the history of architecture up to the present day. Therefore, they should be able to design much better than untrained people. This is quite frequently the case: architects have a better understanding of matters spatial, functional and structural, as well as a wide repertory of tried solutions at their disposal, so they tend to avoid common mistakes non-architects make. At the same time, however, many of their solutions merely follow established patterns and architectural vogues. A design often merely copies what other architects, especially prominent ones, have made, resulting into a mass production of the same instances, which are automatically elevated to the status of prototypes. 

Learning from each other is a common and valuable practice in many areas, professional or not. The problem is again that it may reflect a self-referential architectural culture: that the choice of the particular solution is made not to offer good performance to clients and users but to engage in architectural debates, illustrate adherence to a particular school or otherwise favourably impress peers. The results are even worse than with philosophy because the tenets of architectural debates are often promoted as the solution to wider problems, e.g. societal or environmental. Architecture may adopt goals like sustainability, circularity or inclusiveness but superficially so, insisting on belief in the architects' capacity to change the world and confusing belief and intention with evaluation and performance. The world may be overheating, making summers often unbearable, but clever solutions in passive cooling, many known for decades are seldom applied to new construction or to the existing building stock, while sales of air-conditioning devices (actually a source of overheating themselves) are soaring. It seems that architecture has learned little from the failures caused in the second half of the twentieth century by its combination of blindness and arrogance.